6. Database war

The great database war between Oracle, Sybase, Informix, IBM, and others has been there since a decade. The battleground has majorly been the cost.

Oracle president Charles Phillips made a comment about MySQL, its open source rival, “We’re both in the transportation business. We have a 747 and they have a Toyota.”

The competition intensified when In April2009, IBM partnered with EnterpriseDB came up with IBM’s DB2 9.7 database that enabled Oracle customers to migrate to DB2 freely. The same year in May, Ingres partnered with RedHat to offer the Ingres Development Stack for JBoss, a pre-integrated package comprising the Ingres database, Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux OS and its JBoss open source middleware product.

Oracle, IBM and Microsoft have all claimed over the time that their products are the market leaders. Any user plotting their database and server strategy has heard many warning voices, but getting the balance between performance and cost was never easy.